Elvis Ellis

The key idea of Ellis’s artistic vision is taking something small and making it big, which he pursues in his Dot Matter series, laboriously hand-painting, cutting, and compiling hundreds - thousands of unique dots, and in his Zoom Exploited series where he expands/explodes the colours and textures in each dot. He combines wild, freeform painting with rigorous dedication to style, form and flow.


Ellis’s mode of creating reveals painting as an intuitive process, where the canvas is a space for thought. Each circle is a seed for a greater composition. Each finished composition is a microcosm built by the will to make a mark and communicate through colour. Ellis’s unique mixed media technique of combining acrylic paint with reflective foil complicates the status of painting by teasing apart the age-old dialectics of illusion and surface, as well as volume and flatness, in order to point to and delight in the sly nature of painting.

The resultant effect is a movement of the medium of painting altogether beyond categories such as ‘pop’ and ‘abstract’, towards a celebration of the gesture of creating as such. For Ellis, painting is affirmation: affirmation of the possible as an ever-expandable thing.